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Specifically, my claim is that the common understanding of free speech is not coherent, and relies on Russell's Conjugations to paper over the numerous inconsistancies: My sincere self-expression, your edgy hot-takes, his valueless filth. The reality of this situation seems undeniable to me. There have always been numerous restrictions on speech. There are numerous restrictions on speech now. There are in all likelihood always going to be numerous restrictions on speech. Failure to recognize this reality doesn't prevent restrictions being enforced, it just ensures they're enforced dishonestly and covertly. Honesty is preferable.
Not only am I less anti-free-speech than the woke, I'm more honest than the median non-woke. What is your actual objection, and why do you think some other plan is going to do better?
No, they don't. They don't value it properly, but I see no indication that anyone familiar with the facts is confused about what behaviors are being discussed. To put it very reductively, Lee and Rommel are valuable because they contained both the competence to control armies, and the character to restrain them, to keep the scale of conflict bounded.
I rather doubt that your personal definition is both a) rigorously consistent, and b) capable of being popular enough to get itself implemented and enforced at scale. Assuming I'm wrong, you should find like-minded people to form a community with, and enforce the rules as you see fit within that community. I'm going to do the same with my definition in my community, and hopefully we can each create an environment that fits our values and preferences.
Failing that, if there has to be a single rule that is enforced on everyone, I think it should be my rules.
What alternative to this do you see?
Are you accusing me of dishonesty? My objection is simply that you support censorship in many cases where I don’t, the woke support even more, and Hitler pol pot medieval popes and stalin even more. Your equivocating about how seemingly universal and eternal censorship is can’t obscure this simple fact.
You know what would have kept the conflict truly bounded? If honorable competent men hadn’t fought for the losing evil side.
I'm uncomfortable calling WWII bounded from the german side. If rommel had been a vile sadist, it would perhaps have resulted in a few hundred more dead POWs, puny in the grand scheme of things. Whereas his competence, and that of lee, killed thousands of enemy soldiers directly (without getting into the 'prolonging the war' aspect, which is counted in hundreds of thousands, and tens of thousands respectively).
I think I'd rather find a community of somewhat like-minded people, and try to explain to them why my universalist moral system has the best results, and why their particularist, small-minded view of morality doesn't make sense.
But which rules? If you, like arjin, refuse to answer the fundamental moral question here (what lee and rommel should have done when they got their marching orders), there is no rule. Please realize that this is a different position than to argue that 'yes, they should have acted in accordance with their honor and do their duty, even if the cause was evil', which seems to be the "moral system of small decent things" you guys are gesturing towards.
Are you the median non-woke? In any case, if you think you can implement principled free speech through popular consensus, I think you are at least lying to yourself.
Is your preferred amount of censorship actually implemented currently? Has it ever been implemented? Do you think it ever will be implemented?
You are straightforwardly wrong. The absence of honor on a side doesn't stop that side from prosecuting a conflict effectively, and in fact frequently makes the conflict much, much worse. Israel and Palestine is a perfect example of what a conflict looks like without a Lee on either side. Likewise the Balkans, likewise many of the conflicts in the Middle East. Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that even overwhelming superiority in firepower and material can't actually make up for the lack of honor on the other side.
You should seriously consider the idea that atrocities and lack of honor contribute far more to the length of a conflict than tactical or strategic skill.
Just so long as you're willing to accept them discarding your arguments and ignoring your preferences if you can't actually convince them, which seems a likely outcome, given the historical record.
I am not confident I understand the chain of thought through this paragraph, but I'll give it my best shot.
I do not think that there is a knowable answer to that question. It's like asking which of your children you should sacrifice if you can't save both; the answer is unknowable. There are solid arguments for refusing to serve, and there are solid arguments for serving. Neither is obviously the right answer, and neither is obviously the wrong one. Those who make their decision and then try to execute on it honorably are good men and should be honored, because acting otherwise accomplishes nothing but undermining the virtues a functional society depends on. Again, this is not a mystery to those who fought against these men, only to people such as yourself who imagine a falsely simplified moral landscape.
I can't say whether Rommel should have abandoned his post or stuck with it. I can say that the camp guards running the gas chambers should not have done so, that doing so was straightforwardly evil. Fighting honorably for your country is still honorable even when your country is in the wrong. Murdering helpless innocents is dishonorable, regardless of the circumstances. Doing the former does not make someone responsible for the later, provided that they did not actually participate in it or encourage it, any more than it would be reasonable for me to blame you personally for the sixty million abortionists have killed because you are a member of the society that killed them. You are participating in a purity spiral. I am declining.
I think you are saying that we've claimed that it was good to do their duty, and now we're saying that we don't know what they should have done, and that this is a contradiction. But that is not the case. "This is good" is not "you should do this". A lot of things are good, and it is not always clear which thing is best. Sometimes it is clear that there is no best. Sometimes it seems that something is best according to one's own axioms, but it is also obvious that a slight difference in perspective would result in a very different answer.
Notably, you are leaning heavily on hindsight to assess what they should have done, knowing what actually followed. That is not an advantage Lee or Rommel enjoyed, nor yet Zhukov. You reject the concept of honor when it comes with a cost, but honor without cost is worthless in any case. You imagine that by removing the stubbornness of honor, you would avoid bad things while losing no good things, when all evidence indicates that the precise opposite is the case. You think that worse commanders mean a swifter victory, being blind to the fact that better commanders are a necessary precondition for the sort of decisive warfare that can have a clean end. You imagine, it seems, that wars are extended or retracted by tactical brilliance or its absence on the part of individual commanders, ignoring the numerous contemporary cases of wars begun and ended so quickly that the enemy's will to fight never has a chance to be meaningfully depleted. There are no shortage of wars that do not have honorable leaders executing them. I think you should spend some time considering whether you prefer them to the civil war we got.
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